Six. Simply Having a Wonderful （Not Really） Christmas Wine
Six
SIMPLY HAVING A WONDERFUL (NOT REALLY) CHRISTMAS WINE
The single aunt who overdoes the booze at dinner is a cliché, but, I decide, it’s a good one.
The next night—after I spent most of my morning sleeping in and playing around on my phone, then helped Mom wrap a few gifts—we’re gathered around the table at Brian’s place, where Rachel has made her mind-blowingly good lasagna.
The wine I got yesterday at CVS is less mind-blowingly good, but I top my glass off anyway.
My brother and his wife live in a newer Powell Park subdivision that even Brian himself describes as cookie-cutter.
And it is, to a degree, given the same four models of home repeat themselves, and every third house or so has a looming Christmas inflatable on its front lawn: Christmas Minion, Godzilla-sized penguin, elf with elephantiasis.
But I can’t help being a little jealous of all the space they have; four of my LA apartment would fit on their first floor, and the air smells like good cooking and not burning hair—my neighbor Haybert chemically dyes his waist-length hair it seems weekly and with a not-small amount of pain, based on the wailing noises that come through the walls.
And it’s not only the space. This is a home, not a stopover on the way to a hoped-for better.
The only thing I don’t like about coming here is Pepper, my brother’s dog.
Unlike Alfredo, who straight-up hates me, Pepper has decided that he’d like to mate with me and has not grown any less persistent over the years.
As I try to eat my dinner, I have to gently pry Pepper’s snout from the very intimate place of residence it’s taken up in my crotch.
“Anything you want to do while you’re in town, Jill?” Rachel asks after she finally sits down with the rest of us. “The kids’ winter breaks start in a few days. We could find a place to go sledding.”
“Jill shouldn’t do that,” Brian says. “You could find the biggest baby hill in existence, and as soon as the sled starts going, she involuntarily screams and scares the crap out of everyone. Like she’s starring in Murder on Mini Mountain .”
“Tough talk from someone who was scared to go in the basement for a year,” I retort. Under the table, I sweep my leg to the left as Pepper makes another romantic bid for my nethers. “When he was fifteen.”
Brian scowls at me. “Lots of people are unsettled by basements. Not gliding over snow.”
“Okay, well, we can come up with something,” Rachel says, laughing.
I tell her for the third time that the lasagna is so good because it is and because I’m a little drunk and because every part of me wants to blurt out that I saw Grant and I can’t stop thinking about him.
“You said the lasagna is so good already,” Alice points out.
“You did. And it’s only okay. Mom’s lasagna isn’t as good as her seafood linguine,” Henry chimes in. In addition to his acting, he’s also a pull-no-punches mini food critic.
“I never asked—did you see anyone while you were out on your errands yesterday?” Mom asks.
I have a feeling “anyone” is Grant, but there is no way in hell I’m telling her I bumped into my ex. “Just Corey at the bakery. But we didn’t really talk.”
“What a guy he is,” Dad says.
“Yeah, he sent the middle school a big gift basket of cookies,” Brian said. “And his kids don’t even go there yet.”
“Or maybe his kids aren’t very bright and he’s trying to butter you up before they’re your students.” I point my fork at Brian.
“Jill! After what that man’s been through,” Mom says.
“Been through?” I ask, confused.
“Christina. She died early last year,” Mom says. “She was out for a run. Cardiac arrest. She had some kind of heart valve issue that they didn’t know about.”
“What? Corey is a widower?” My stomach drops at the news.
I feel the worst kind of horrible. I’d been mocking his perfect existence, and the guy and his children had gone through hell.
And Christina. She’d always been nice to everyone.
Here I was, lamenting my lack of career success when Christina was just gone .
“I told you about Christina,” Mom says. “Remember? I said I saw Allie at the memorial service?”
Mom probably did tell me. But a lot of the time when we’ve been on the phone for a while, I idly shop online and kind of tune out her Powell Park updates. So now I feel like a double asshole.
I slug back another gush of wine and spear a huge, cheesy heap of lasagna with my fork. But as I watch the strands of cheese stretch upward, I lose my appetite. It’s not the cheese—the cheese is beautiful. It’s me and my ugly thoughts. It’s the sadness of Corey’s story.
“Now I remember,” I lie. “Jet lag.” I shake my head as if to say, Silly old me! I pour more wine in my glass, draining the rest of the bottle.
On the car ride home, I’m in the backseat. I yawn dramatically and pretend to fall asleep when my dad stops to get gas.
“Jilly,” Mom says, turning slightly. I nestle down to play up how deeply asleep I am.
Really, I’m merely very drunk. Seeing Grant again, and then learning what happened to Christina, has left me with an icky ache in my chest. When Dad gets back in the driver’s seat and buckles himself in, Mom asks him, “Do you think Jill needs help?”
“She just got drunk,” my dad says as he starts the car. “It happens. How else do you get through the holidays?”
Go, Dad , I think.
“I wish she’d go talk to Grant. I think she’s not over the breakup.”
“It was years ago. For all we know, she’s dating someone else now.” He flips on the turn signal, and I know we’re almost to the house. At least I won’t have to hear them evaluate me much longer. “Or he might be.”
“He might. But Jill. Hmm. I doubt it.” Thanks, Mom. “I know she can take care of herself, but… does she seem happy? Or at least okay?”
I hear the crunch of packed snow and sneak one eye open to see we’ve pulled into our driveway. As he turns off the car, my dad groans. “I think all that cheese was a bad idea.” He clears his throat and opens the car door. “See you in there, but I’d stay away from the hall bathroom.”
“Cal! What have I said about keeping a little mystery?”
“I’m sorry. I just love to tell you everything, Hels.”
Ugh. They’re even perfect when they’re talking about diarrhea.
I fake snore so that my parents don’t know I’ve heard their whole conversation. “Jill, wake up,” Mom says. “You should sleep in a bed.”
I pour myself out of the seat and manage to wobble to the house.
In the kitchen, Mom tries to offer me tea.
“Nope,” I say, heaping a bunch of the SweetHart’s Bakery cookies onto a plate.
“I’m going to try these cookies everyone is in love with.
” One of the bottles of wine I brought back from CVS is still on the counter.
I think about uncorking it and decide it’s a bad idea.
I linger in the kitchen as Mom goes into the family room. I hear the TV come on and Mom clicking through a few channels before stopping on what I can tell is the Heartfelt Channel’s signature twinkling promo music.
“Jill! Get in here!” Mom sounds like she’s holding a winning lotto ticket and wants me to double-check the numbers.
“What is it?” I say, sauntering into the room with a mouthful of cookie. The shortbread is helping to soak up some of the wine in my stomach, but it’s also reminding me I’m still a little hungry, having abandoned my lasagna.
“It’s our favorite one! Come watch with me.
” Mom pats the couch cushion next to hers.
The famous Heartfelt Christmas movie intro plays: sleigh bells capped with a woman’s happy sigh, and her saying, “Open your heart.” I know I should go, but instead, I stand just behind the sofa and watch the opening of Christmas Turnabout .
It is our favorite one. It’s a time-travel movie.
In it, Julie Pfeiffer is a high school teacher at her alma mater, and she’s chaperoning the Christmas turnabout dance, along with the school woodshop teacher, David Garland.
He’s hunky and kind, but he and present-day Julie clearly have some awkward baggage between them.
We cut back to ten years prior, Julie’s senior year, when David is very obviously hoping for her to ask him to the turnabout dance, but instead, she asks popular jock Ethan Edwards, which turns out to be a mistake when Ethan cheats on her while they’re away at college.
Present-day Julie walks under some enchanted mistletoe as her favorite song from senior year plays, and she goes back in time to nudge her younger self to ask David to the dance instead.
The movie came out when I was in junior high, and I watched it with Mom every year until I graduated from high school.
But I can’t bring myself to sit down with her now.
It’s one thing to watch a Heartfelt movie when I’m drunk and alone and can make fun of it, but it’s another thing entirely to watch it with my mother, who will likely now use the theme of true love to badger me about when I’m going to have someone special to share Christmas with.
I’m feeling sorry for myself, but then I think of Corey again and feel even worse for acting like my problems are anywhere on the same level.
“I… um… I promised I’d meet a friend for a drink.”
Mom cranes her neck to look up at me. “Didn’t you have enough at dinner?”
I roll my eyes. “It wasn’t that much,” I say. “And I’ll Uber.”
“What friend?” she asks. It’s a good question. What friends do I even have left in Powell Park?
“It’s more like a whoever’s-in-town meetup kind of thing. I think some people I went to high school with will be there.”
“Oh! How nice!” Mom says with a tight smile.
I can tell by her voice rising an octave that she neither thinks this is nice nor believes me at all.
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to watch Julie get things right the first time on my own.
” She turns back to the screen, where older, wiser Julie is in the past and pretending to be a high school student to befriend her younger self.
I’m seized by a wobble of guilt. I could—I should —sink into the comfy couch, tuck myself into a blanket, and lean my head on my mom’s shoulder.
Maybe she’d pet my hair like she did when I was in eighth grade, and maybe she wouldn’t say anything about my lack of a love life.
But I think about what I heard her asking my dad in the car—whether I’m happy—and doubt I’ll be able to relax.
My stomach makes a strange gurgling sound. The cookie’s not enough to quell my hunger.
Nora Ephron, wise Jewish woman that she was, would tell me to go for Chinese food. At a Chinese restaurant, I can pretend for an hour that Christmas doesn’t exist.